Moab is my Washpot.

Moab was a large tract of land, a country with its own king just outside Canaan., in which his Fantasticness would deposit his…leavings.

Yahweh dump him shi’ on Moab..

Yeees… a bombardment of shadow.

Moab, in ancient times, had

”become so utterly contemptible as to be likened to a washpot or basin in which men wash their feet. More than this, however, may have been intended—nay, we feel sure was intended by the expression.”

Thankyou, Phil of the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit who, I’m afraid, has no time to answer any questions about the geneology of his family, so that queue will have to disperse.

Moab was the kid in the playground that got dumped on, that Yahweh deposited his imperfections and various bits of nail and hair and mank into.

These days we call it projective identification. It describes the process by which unconscious material can be effectively disowned by one party and claimed by another as if it were their own.

The dominant model that we have of the psyche, which we inherited from Freud, finds this phenomena a little embarrassing and hard to account for because the theories of that paradigm are intrapsychic, you fucked yourself up, rather than interpersonal, whereby one person might well pass on their ‘stuff ‘ to another.

Did you pack this suitcase, Sir? Has it been with anyone else since the time it was packed? Could some low down sonofabitch slip their shi’ in your stuff and make out like it was, you know, your shi’? make you carry it for them…so they can swan through, or by, or over, or around, and let you take da muddafuggin rap?

When Freud, as a young turk, tried to suggest, before the collective might of the Viennesse Psychiatric Society, in his ‘Aetiology of Hysteria’, (1896) that the cause of mental disturbance lay in the way people were treated as children, he was entirely shut down…

Wot do you call a bunch of psychiatrists?

Is this a joke? not now for chrissake,

No, but its interesting.. would it be a ‘dourness’, or maybe a ‘bowtie’, or a

be fucking serious will you

Perfectly serious, serious business, I mean it must have been like the inquisition for poor Sigmund..

Except that he recanted and went back to his, ‘you only imagined it’, theory..

And were his friends, friends with him again?

Yes.

And did he get his stuff back?

Yes.

And the badges, and the twizzly bits?

Yes, even the twizzly bits.

Bonza

So, the notion that projective identification even exists is a social faux pas in certain cirles, marking you out as a believer in the myth that parents burden kids and hits straight on the nerve of how people go crazy.

Projective identification works like this; You depend on me for your life. Don’t forget that. But I don’t have what you need. Do forget that. We’ll have an arrangement, a covenant. Instead of what you need, which you now can’t remember, you will be special, instead.

Good here, innit?

And for this grand prize… of specialness, which is really top notch, you will fufil certain… conditions, expectations, a subclause of which, in tweeeeeeenzy print will be, ‘and carry my shit while I suck out your heart through a straw.’

It doesn’t matter. You just sign it. The ‘Dependence for life’ proviso at the top of the contract renders the rest of it all academic. You sign.

Anyhoo, yes, the grand prize, and our little arrangement…

One of the things that earmarks a narcissistic encounter is the use of projective identification. You get to feel as though someone just crapped inside you. Or made you feel that you deserve no more.

Their avid fortifying and walling off of some prefered, though highly defended self image, is hard work. Its easier to get some other poor bastard to take charge of all the incongruous stuff in life. The hidden painting in an attic solution tends not to work too well. Neither does walling it up. No, give it a host. Someone who’ll just walk away with your shi’ , now gnawing on their innards rather than your own.

Sounds like a plan.

One person passes another a piece of themselves, or a gritty solution of all their…dirt, under the table, without anyone noticing. And if you are unlucky it will be yours forever unless you can palm it off on someone else.

You’re it!

They get to be grateful, need you, miss you. You can be their special little guy. And their whore.

Moab was Yahweh’s bitch.

And so God washes off his pollution onto….people, just across the river, and we, like dutiful lambs, having learned by divine example, have each other.  Oh frabjous day!

And so, oh great and mighty spoon of my heart, whilst you maintain all that fine PR with regular sousing of the people with your leavings your use of Moab as a washpot is so much less evolved than acceptance and dying and renewal. You get that lovely, fluffy bunny, freshly laundered smell that says, ‘mummy loves you’, rather than… ‘washpot’ which is so…frikkin…washpot.

ITS DONE OF YOUR DAMNBUSIBESSMJHGKVRYEDJDYKULYBLIUK

Well, actually, it is, oh great mountain of corpulence, because who is Moab other than me and mine?

THEN YOU WILL BE MY WASHPOL<YRFVHHGGYIFGUYGFUGY

We already are oh jewelled heap of my bowels, and its starting to piss me off.

 

 

 

Published by

andywhite

Psychotherapist/writer/artist/ author of, 'Going Mad to Stay Sane', a psychology of self-destructiveness, about to come into its third edition. Soon to be printed for the first time, 'Abundant Delicious.. the Secret and the Mystery', described by activist Satish Kumar as, ' A Tao of the Soul'. This book documents the archetypal country through which the process of individuation occurs and looks at the trials and tribulations we might expect on the way. In the meantime..... Narcissisim is the issue of our age. This blog looks at how it operates, how it can damage and how we may still fruit despite it.

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